Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us,
too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss.
Our lives take place. Who are we
in this place called the United States?
To live in this nation is to be marked by residues of its still unfolding
history, residues of silence and displacement across generations.
Human experience and the history of the American land itself
have, in fragmented tellings, artificially pulled apart
what cannot be disentangled: nature and "race."